Business ecosystems come of age

In today’s business world, denser and richer networks of connection, blurring boundaries, collaboration, and interdependence foster the growth of continuously evolving “business ecosystems.” The notion of business ecosystems is now a crucial focal point for innovation, analysis, and strategic planning.

Deloitte’s Business Trends report, Business ecosystems come of age, investigates some key strategic questions that come with a world of ecosystems, and how forward-thinking firms are answering them. You’ll find nine articles that can each be read as a stand-alone, but together, provide an integrated overview of a historic transition in the world of business in the 21st century.

Explore the articles:

1. Introduction: Business ecosystems come of age

Businesses are moving beyond traditional industry silos and coalescing into richly networked ecosystems, creating new opportunities for innovation alongside new challenges for many incumbent enterprises.

2. Blurring boundaries, uncharted frontiers

The business environment has never been static, simple, or certain: Profound change, sometimes abrupt, sometimes gradual, has-been reshaping the world for centuries. Long-standing boundaries and constraints that have traditionally determined the evolution of business are dissolving, allowing new ecosystem possibilities to flourish.

Ecosystems are dynamic and co-evolving communities of diverse actors who create new value through increasingly productive and sophisticated models of both collaboration and competition.

3. Wicked Opportunities

We’re seeing a trend by which many kinds of complex, dynamic, and seemingly intractable social challenges “wicked problems” are being reframed and attacked with renewed vigour through solution ecosystems.

4. Regulating ecosystems

Regulators, whose job has always been to protect the public from danger, exploitation, or insufficient competition in reasonably stable markets, now face another danger: that their own application of old rules to new realities might suppress innovations of tremendous potential value to the public.

5. Supply chains and value webs

Over the last few decades, supply chain professionals have helped transform the business environment. They have contributed to accelerated globalisation by directly connecting actors in emergent and developed economies. They have enabled many major corporations to become nimbler and leaner by focusing on what they themselves do best, while carefully constructing external arrangements for the rest.

6. The new calculus of corporate portfolios

“Ecosystem” is a term we’re seeing more and more to explain the logic of mergers, acquisitions, and divestitures. From Xerox’s Ursula Burns to Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, many enterprise leaders are strategically reconfiguring their asset portfolios with an eye to the fast-evolving business ecosystems in which their firms are situated. This isn’t just a language change as a trendy metaphor enters the management lexicon.

7. Minimum Viable Transformation

By now, top management teams have almost universally embraced the notion that their firms must innovate not only at the level of products and services but at the level of business models. Rethinking the fundamentals of how business creates and captures value wasn’t a priority in an era of slow change and stable industries, but during a time of rapid convergence of enabling technologies, customer desires, and business ecosystems, it now must be.

8. Beyond design thinking

“Design thinking” has been increasingly embraced by the world of business and business education over the last decade. During a time of intense change, this is a positive development. It helps firms develop the courage and use tradecraft that moves beyond analysis to embrace synthesis as well. This is part of what it takes to help firms commit to building something bold and newsworthy, instead of only seeking the tactics needed to better sell what is already known.

9. The power of platforms

By now, top management teams have almost universally embraced the notion that their firms must innovate not only at the level of products and services but at the level of business models. Rethinking the fundamentals of how business creates and captures value wasn’t a priority in an era of slow change and stable industries, but during a time of rapid convergence of enabling technologies, customer desires, and business ecosystems, it now must be.

Key Contacts

Monitor Deloitte Leader

Louis leads the Monitor Deloitte Strategy & Operations practice. He has over 15 years consulting experience and has been involved in a wide range of strategic and transformational engagements. Louis i... More

Africa Industrial Products & Services Leader

Mike is the Deloitte Africa Advisory leader for the Manufacturing, Automotive and Construction sectors. He sits on the Deloitte Consulting Africa Leadership Committee and the South African Consulting.... More

Associate Director

Ben is an Associate Director in the Innovation and Growth Services division of Monitor Deloitte in South Africa. Ben has a 14 year track-record of work across Sub-Saharan Africa, with a focus on the d... More

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